黑料不打烊

This exhibition brings together modern portraits from the gallery鈥檚 inventory, with newer works by represented artists and guest artists who are showing with us for the first time. The portraits date from 1907 to the present and encompass photography, printmaking, drawing, collage, painting and ceramics. While each work has been selected for its individual qualities, when brought together certain emotional themes and conceptual strategies emerge, connecting images made in different times and places.

In several pictures the subject is a close relative of the artist. This is unsurprising given that family members are often near at hand and have become tolerant of modelling for their loved ones. We have David Hockney鈥檚 affectionate 1972 ink drawing of his father in a bow tie and a more melancholy, yet vividly coloured photo-collage of his mother asleep, made ten years later. Lucian Freud鈥檚 daughter Ib has explained how sitting for a picture was the only way she and her siblings got to spend any time with their father, a fact which, once known, adds a feeling of pathos to her portrait; while Tarka Kings鈥� romantic drawing of her teenage son on a train, commemorates his passage into adulthood.

Other portraits are set in the more professional space of the artist鈥檚 studio where paid models might expect to endure increased levels of discomfort. Freud鈥檚 etching Man Resting (State II), 1988 shows his model crashed out, face crumpled under the weight of a heavy head. Photos of Freud and Bacon鈥檚 studios maintain the mythology of the studio as a heroic space, where paint is wrestled into submission by masterful (male) artists, and yet both artist鈥檚 look uncertain and even physically unsteady when the camera is turned on them.

Several of the photographers included here take an experimental approach to the medium. The low angle from which Brandt photographs his nude on a beach, follows an established thread of abstraction in modern photography, but Brandt鈥檚 British backdrops offer a more grungy realism than early modernist images originating in Paris and New York. In Hockney鈥檚 photo-collages dating from 1982-3 he discovered a new photographic language, analogous to Cubist painting. While Richard Learoyd鈥檚 life sized Polaroid print Olya in Yellow, Two, 2010, combines an exceptional level of verisimilitude (as if one might reach into the picture and touch the figure) with a composition indebted to history painting.